TV REVIEWS : Captivating ‘Cooperstown’ Hails Athletes

There’s something about old ballplayers mulling regrets and fantasizing about what might have been that’s inherently the stuff of drama.

Playwright Lee Blessing’s captivating “Cooperstown” (at 5, 7 and 9 tonight on TNT cable) is not a documentary but a wry fictional salute to all those aging athletes who live in the afterglow of the playing field and curse the Fates that conspired to keep them from glory. In this case, that’s the Hall of Fame, which denies yet again one fictional Harry Willette, ace hurler of the Barons (1947-1963).

Starring Alan Arkin as the cantankerous Willette, “Cooperstown” is a man’s journey into his past, to the mistakes and the estrangements, all accompanied by the affable ghost of a former teammate (Graham Greene). Arkin is so at home in the role it’s like imagining Ty Cobb if he had never made it to the Hall of Fame and determined to dig his spikes into everybody who had kept him out.

Willette’s wacky odyssey in an old Caddie convertible, unerringly rumbling toward a tumultuous induction ceremony at Cooperstown, includes sorites to a bar and the sportswriter (Paul Dooley) who blackballed him, to the runt who hit a homer off him in a deciding championship game (the irascible Charles Haid, who also hit a homer directing this movie) and a ripe encounter with the old girlfriend and fan (the blowzy Ann Wedgeworth).